This week there is news!
Image via Wikipedia
The crack Coots News Team uncovered three good stories this week. Go figure! Weeks go by where the news just isn’t worth any attention and then we have three stories that deserve highlighting. I can’t decide if the news mongers are clueless rabble-rousers like the Wall Street protesters or fiendishly intelligent manipulators of public sentiment like our politicians. Anyway I had to make a choice today between Congress, the LA Unified School District and Germany. Any one of the three is abundantly scorn-worthy but I finally made a choice.
The winner is Germany.
It wasn’t even close. If there is a country that deserves to stand in the corner and wear a dunce cap, it is undeniably Germany. No other country comes close. The twentieth century should be dedicated to Germany, the instigator of our only two World Wars. Let’s just give them full credit. Germany invented World Wars and the two we experienced would never have happened without her. If we spent the first half of the twentieth century stopping those German World Wars, we spent the last half repairing the damage. There is just something terribly wrong about Germany. So much hubris, vanity, self congratulatory snobbery all wrapped up in a nice little package along with cuckoo clocks, strudel and cars you can’t afford. You couldn’t invent Germany.
The European economic crisis had it’s beginning in the welfare state mentality created by Bismark which became the model for the bloated European welfare system collapsing before our very eyes. You would think that Germans would be ashamed of their history and eager to create a new identity. Maybe that is why they support the European Union. Why else would they embrace its endless bureaucracy and limited freedom and rights. It all may be a smokescreen to hide the poisonous impact of the German state on the world under cover of the bland and oppressive European Union, just what Orwell warned us about. Who can say that Germany hasn’t been running a surreptitious World War III exporting German thinking to the rest of Europe? If so, it seems to be failing but that’s not the point of today’s story. Germany may be bad news for the world. German thinking may subvert reason and self interest as it spreads its influence throughout the world but Germany isn’t content with destroying the world. Germany is out to destroy Germany as today’s story demonstrates. Maybe we should all be cheering.
It’s all about purity
Solar energy boondoggle
Today’s story is about Germany’s quest for ideological purity in energy. If there is an energy source that comes close to the purity of the old Nazi notion of the master race, it is energy from the sun. It is so pure, so natural and lets be honest so blond and blue eyed. No nasty combustion producing pollutants. No misbehaving particles from reactors to damage the neighborhood. The sun is the mother’s milk of energy sources. What German wouldn’t love it? And therefore the uber-wise Germans have decided to get rid of nuclear energy and seriously limit producing electricity from those nasty fossil fuels. But like always with Germany, reality trumps German intellect. All powerful as the German state may be and brilliant as the German intellect has proven itself, there is still a small problem with solar energy in Germany. The sun don’t shine in Germany and no amount of intellect or money will change that face. It’s taking Germany to bankruptcy. They have found the solar subsidy sinkhole.
Re-Evaluating Germany’s Blind Faith in the Sun
I wish I could trust our own government to be more practical but that German thinking is quite contagious.
Hey! easy on the Germans. They’ll get the World War thing down. Just needs a little more engineering; wait till the next one and you’ll see.
Their were solar panels on a lot of houses, when I was there in 2010; wind turbines too. We’ll see how that works out.
BTW, I have solar panels on my roof, and now only pay a $1.98 monthly processing fee to SCE, because I is officially a power generating facility. The even better besides being totally Green, is that the government (State and Feds) financed almost half of the $20K my system cost. I can keep my hot-tub boiling if I want and it don’t cost me a dime 🙂
Hansi,
You are welcome. As you know there is no free lunch or even free solar. Unfortunately the taxpayers and utility customers that are paying for your solar don’t even know they are paying for it and certainly haven’t a clue how much it is costing them. Enjoy!
And one more thing, Hansi. I am very much afraid you might be right. One of these days the Germans will get it right and then where will we be?
Ralph, at least the Germans don’t give a damn about political correctness. I followed your link to der Spiegel, and found that the article did, among other things, refer to solar energy as “the great white hope”.
Damn! Just DAMN!
Can you imagine a US publication describing ANYTHING as “the great white hope”? Race cards would be flying from every corner.
Hooray for der Spiegel!
Bob,
I did tell you ‘blond and blue eyed’.
Aye, indeed contagious. There’re lots of countries with lots of sun like Brazil, India, China, Australia or even New Mexico. Couldn’t understand the allegory in this article ‘the great white hope’, they’d better say ‘the great black hope’. Africa has, you know, the most sun that may become saleable like its diamonds, or its oil, or its humans.
Germany exports more energy than she (hi,hi never heard such a compliment for this eerie, dark country) imports, without having oil and gas and coal and… and this time she (hi, hi) has effectively propagated a new dangerous race, contagious even to French, called Frauenpower. Christine Lagarde’s already speaking a better English than Arny. Be careful y’Anglo-Saxonians from overseas!
Greetings to America from a green haired and red eyed, gullible Frizz from Dresden
*I’ve been talking about women, not Margret or Condoleezza
Mario,
As I recall, great white hope dates from the early 20th century in the states referrnig to finding a ‘white’ boxer to take the title from a string of blacks. Europe is looking very strange these days from this side of the pond. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Europe was our heritage. With craziness like this, however, Germany won’t be the problem because without energy, the Germans will be living in caves. The French seem more cunning. Keep us posted.